I joined Facebook back when it only allowed college students with .edu email addresses. (and my usage has declined steadily ever since.)

But I think that introducing the concept of charging users for social media as a service is actually a good thing for the health of the internet and society in general.

Anything tech platforms can do to reduce reliance on advertising revenue should make for a better product. Actually offering a customer service department!? What a concept.

So much of what made Facebook and Instagram turn sour is the total dependence on advertising for revenue.

(I don't know why Slashdot's mobile site couldn't handle my phone's punctuation. reposting, fixed.)

Tumblr has been running since 2007, I don't think anyone newly interested in using Tumblr today will refrain from joining until it supports ActivityPub, and therefore stay on Twitter, which also doesn't support ActivityPub.

Quite the opposite, this promise reassures any Twitter refugees who find Tumblr more appealing than Mastodon, that they can start using Tumblr today, and eventually they'll be also be able to connect with the others who went to Mastodon instead.

I am one of those who finds Tumblr the most appealing social media platform at this point, and it seems like being able to follow Mastodon users through Tumblr if I wanted would be a good thing too. We'll see...

Tumblr has been running since 2007, I donâ(TM)t think anyone newly interested in using Tumblr today will refrain from joining until it supports ActivityPub, and therefore stay on Twitter, which also doesnâ(TM)t support ActivityPub.

Quite the opposite, this promise reassures any Twitter refugees who find Tumblr more appealing than Mastodon, that they can start using Tumblr today, and eventually theyâ(TM)ll be also be able to connect with the others who went to Mastodon instead.

I am one of those who finds Tumblr the most appealing social media platform at this point, and it seems like being able to follow Mastodon users through Tumblr if I wanted would be a good thing too. Weâ(TM)ll seeâ¦

Yes but what if my smartphone battery dies, how will I scan the QR code then?! Or what if I don't have my phone in my pocket when I'm in the kitchen half awake trying to make the morning coffee?

If only we could invent a technology that could be embedded within the milk itself, to indicate directly to standard human senses whether the milk has spoiled... perhaps a visual or olfactory signal... just spitballing here, what if we could make the milk emit a displeasing smell when it's gone bad? Then all the user would have to do is sniff the carton prior to use...

Oh wait...

Actually it can lie all the way up to 1920x1200, the resolution of the 17" MBP or my 24" iMac.

My first gen iPad doesn't have a camera so I can't attest to resolution or field of view, but using my iPhone's camera it only needs to be about a foot from a letter size page to capture the page completely.

You could rig up a stand which held an iPad a reasonable distance from the reading material, maybe with a light for the source material, maybe with a periscope-like arrangement of mirrors.

Not sure if the pinch-to-zoom gesture would be a challenge, but hardware-wise a tablet with a decent camera seems like the easiest place to start.

In the Bay Area at least, everyone knows the world is ending in two days!

JUDGMENT DAY
MAY 21 ...Cry mightily unto God

"The Bible Guarantees It"

It's on billboards, subway ads, atheist groups taking out counter-ads... people throwing ironic 'rapture parties'... as a marketing campaign it's been admirably successful. ( see billboard photo: http://instagr.am/p/DAOiE/ )

agreed that the lack of filesystem exposed to the user is one of the most striking desktop PC metaphors omitted from iOS. at least for someone who understands filesystems. I'm the kind of person that used to hand-curate my mp3 collection according to very a specific file naming scheme. you probably are too. (now I'm pretty happy to let iTunes do that.) my coworkers' computers, on the other hand, have APPALLING desktops. piles and piles of files and folders, so buried that they can't find anything, yet that's where they habitually continue to save every file they collect, despite my having shown them how to make their browsers download to other folders by default, etc. the smarter among them have fallen back on exclusively using the search feature in file picker dialogs to find files they can't remember where they saved. (so pretty much everything.)

having used both Android and iOS, Android apps seem to be pretty messy with where they store files. iOS apps might be too, but I couldn't tell, so at least it didn't bother me. as other commenters have noted, the example of the Photo Library is a model that could be extended for passing other kinds of files between apps.

iOS doesn't show a filesystem to the user because it was designed for my coworkers. I think Apple made the right choice. it's one of the things that makes iOS feel unlike a computer, that liberation from the hopelessly disorganized desktop and home folders that most people can't help but spawn.

People who send email newsletters (not spam) that people have signed up to receive, want to have analytics data on who reads their messages. Perfectly normal, not dastardly companies that offer email marketing platforms like Constant Contact, MailChimp, CampaignMonitor, etc. all include such recipient tracking by default. Not only by noticing whether or not somebody downloads an image in an HTML email, but also by rewriting all URLs linked in the message so that individual clicks can be registered. These are all recorded uniquely to each subscriber so the sender can tell who is interested in what content. Anyone who is surprised about this is out of the loop. This kind of information is very useful for the nonprofit I work for to understand which of our opt-in subscribers are interested in what content and how we can make our emails more useful for their work.

http://www.mailchimp.com/features/reports

How about selling the included Server license for something less than its $499 retail price, buying a $29 copy of consumer Snow Leopard, and pocketing the difference?

The Server configuration of this rev almost looks like a loss leader.

You can mount iPhones as disks for free on Mac with "Disk for iPhone" http://code.google.com/p/iphonedisk/ or "Phone Disk" http://www.macroplant.com/phonedisk/

I do it all the time!

Open Atrium is a multipurpose intranet/project management system built with the open source CMS Drupal. It's easy on the eyes and since it's just a fancy distribution of Drupal it can potentially be extended in almost any direction. Worth a look, sounds like it could address all your needs.

But then again it also sounds like Microsoft Office Live Workspace could also meet your needs. I'm not sure how complicated you want to get.

We have a few licenses that used to be managed through eOpen, I never received any notification about its disappearance, but happened to discover the switch to Volume License Service Center on Friday when trying to login to eOpen. VLSC was definitely up and running at that point, I could log in and manage the same licenses that I used to with eOpen.

That said, the initial terms of agreement screen that appeared after logging into to VLSC was terribly confusing. A blank window with no instructions, I was expected to figure out that I needed to manually select my region and language from a non-obvious drop-down menu, then click a button labeled "Go", causing the terms of agreement to appear in English on the screen. There is a box below in which you are meant to type your name and click "I agree", however this button was not clickable until figuring out how to make the agreement appear above, and there were no instructions to indicate this. I spent several minutes feeling very foolish as I typed in my name, couldn't click the button to proceed, clicked "Cancel" instead, got to the VLSC dashboard to find that all the functions were disabled because I hadn't accepted the agreement, logged out and back in to make the terms window appear again, repeat a few times. Grrr.

This was a big thing a few years back, when everyone seemed to want a small Mac desktop in a "pizza box" form factor. I guess this was pre-Mac Mini. You would get a PowerMac G4 logic board and power supply, and add your own case and accessories. Someone even came up with a concept for a ready made kit called the iBox which was a bring-your-own-logic-board PowerMac system. Not sure if that ever really saw the light of day. I really wanted one.

http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mac/news/2003/04/58310